Chapter One
I wake up 9 years later and only now start to realize that the story he’d told me that night just might be true. It didn’t hit me like a truck, it wasn’t fast, it wasn’t quick and gut-wrenching. The revelation hit me hard, and it hit me slow. It was the kind of slow that is so slow you can hardly tell that it’s moving; iceberg slow.
I plugged my nice little headphones into my MP3 player, not listening quite intently to the music, but enjoying the noise it produced compared to the sounds of my baby sister. Listening to the music, I traipsed around the house, cleaning this and that, here and there; doing all the household chores that father would neglect. I could hear her, even with the headphones on, my sister’s whines coming from the back room.
“Baby, don’t you know, daddy doesn’t give a ******** about you.
Baby don’t you know, I don’t give a ******** about you either.”
I could imagine what would have happened had I said that and Dad were home to hear it. Thankfully, he wasn’t. He was out working, yeah, working. He was out working his way to the bottom of a bottle, the lethargic drinking ********. The way I figured, his job was to be the sleazy-drunk-guy-in-the-back-booth-that-wasted-his-life-in-the-bottle. It was a full-time employment.
If he’d heard me say he didn’t give a ******** about my baby sister—the truth, that is—he probably would have struck me across the face in his drunken stupor. Really. Hard. He never really did it for no reason at all, so I guess it can’t be called abuse, but only when I would get out of hand.
I think he was always so harsh. I think he was so harsh because he never settled down, not even after Mom had my sister and I. He remained a wild, untamed mustang. He wouldn’t be broken and he’d kick and buck, fighting for control against the flow of a normal society and a tame lifestyle. I think that’s why she left us. I think that’s why mom left him, because he wasn’t ready yet, to devote himself to his family—too busy devoting himself to the bottle—and he was too uncontrollable. He didn’t care about my sister, I’m willing to bet he didn’t care about me, and sometimes I have to wonder if he ever cared about Mom. Why did I not care? Why was I okay with it? Maybe I was okay with it because I was just like him; I didn’t care and I think I hated myself for it.
I put away the power vacuum cleaner, picked my little sister up from the back room, brought her out to the living room. I fed her. She still whined. I checked her diaper, nothing there. I rocked her back and forth in my arms. She still whined. I put her back in the crib and gave her a pacifier; she spit the thing out and hit me right in the face.
Jesus ******** I hate children.
‘Forget about it,’ I thought, ‘I’ll just let her scream herself into catatonia or some such similar condition.’ I decided I would spend some time over at a friend’s house to get away from the shrill, annoying whines of that damnable little thing; it wasn’t like Dad was going to be home anytime soon to find out I’d left her all alone and unattended.
I snatched my jacket off of the clothes hook on the back of my door—my favorite jacket; it was a dark gray piece with a large black stripe running up the right sleeve—, a few of the thin peach cigars my dad had spread out around his desk along with my pink and black zebra-striped zippo. I threw my jacket on, stuffed the cigars and zippo into the jacket pockets and headed for the front door.
“Ah, ow…”
My head, it started throbbing like someone was beating a bass drum inside of it. Everything started getting blurry. I felt something mellifluous flowing from my eyes. I don’t think I was crying but it was some kind of fluid. I stopped and rubbed away some of the stuff with the back of my hand. I was right, I wasn’t crying. At least, I wasn’t crying tears.
“What the hell is this?” My vision started blurring even worse, I almost couldn’t see. I groped blindly around the kitchen where I thought the phone would be, knocking it off the hook and onto the floor. I hunched over on all fours and grabbed the phone and tried to dial the emergency number. The phone beeped as I pressed what I thought was the ‘9’ button, and beeped again as I pressed ‘1’. And then everything went black. But, and I thought I heard it, there was a voice, and it said,
“Hello.”
I awoke, later, though how much later I couldn’t tell at first. What roused me must have been the all too familiar shouting of an irate, panicked father. Once my vision cleared, I saw his rage was directed at me. And I saw him standing over the small, unmoving form of my sister. Her face was blue, and her little chest did not rise with inhalation or fall with exhalation.
I think it took everything he had to keep himself calm and from seriously hurting me. His face was cherry red and his eyes were red from crying when he told me, between heaving sobs, to leave and never come back. I did well to listen. I was a good girl. I got my messenger bag, filled a tote bag with clothes. I then proceeded to take Dad’s secret store of cash he had hidden away in a hollow book, and the handgun he kept in a desk drawer. He was far too busy freaking out over my sister, or rather, what used to be my sister lying on the living room floor, wondering what the hell he was going to do. I knew what the hell I was going to do, and it started with getting out of here. So I left, messenger bag and tote hung over my shoulder, enough cash to last me a few months if I was careful in a zippered inner pocket of the bag, MP3 player playing soothing melodies in my ear, and the gun in my jacket pocket.
The sober drunk followed me to the door, cradled in his arms, wrapped in blankets, was his precious little baby girl. I saw him drop the mass into the trash bin. Real precious.
I turned the corner of the cul-de-sac, produced one of the peach cigars I’d filched from Dad’s room, held it in my mouth, lit it with the pink and black zebra striped zippo, and took a nice deep drag. Damn, these are some fine cigars. I exhaled a puff of gray into the crisp, black night sky. It smelled peachy.
‘Why the hell is he kicking me out? I didn’t do a damned thing.” I walked down the sidewalk, lit only by the ugly orange of the sodium street lights, letting the cigar hang loosely between my lips. Then I pondered to myself. ‘What if I did do it; killed her? What if it had been my hands around that tiny little neck of hers?’ The sodium lamps flickered above me. A chill crawled slowly up my spine, I wrapped my hand tightly around the grip of the handgun.
I managed to make my way into the city before the clock struck midnight, which is just outside of the small suburban offshoot of a as it town where a home that was no longer mine sat with a drunkard inside. Something about the city helped reassure my sense of safety, as odd may be for most people. Even with its dark, dank alleys, too-sharp corners, and unexpected dead ends, I felt inescapably safe.
Now, when the city was asleep, save for the occasional car rocketing by, leaving behind bright streaks of red from its taillights, I felt alone. I felt as alone as the last man on earth and that nothing could change that, I wanted nothing to change that. I turned into an empty alleyway and let myself fall softly on the hard ground and the brick wall. When I sat, fatigue finally came like a tidal wave through my body. I put out the stub of the peach cigar, flicked it down the alley, held my bags tight between my chest and legs, and before I knew it, I’d fallen asleep.
It might have been three hours, maybe it had been four, since I’d passed out, I couldn’t tell for there were no signs of the dawn on the horizon. I hadn’t slept very well. What roused me from sleep were the voices echoing in the walls of the alleyway, too loud to be ignored. I found that it was quite difficult to get up still-half asleep and fell over in the attempt. Now alert after kissing pavement, gross disease ridden alley-pavement, I jumped up and went further down the alleyway, where the voices were coming from, to investigate. Not a smart idea, I’m just a dumb 16-year-old girl with a handgun in her jacket, but it would be more interesting than sitting around doing nothing. The conversation between the pair of voices turned to loud screaming. I withdrew the gun from my jacket and began to sprint down to the origin of the voices. I came upon a large warehouse and, slipping through a hole in the guard fence, I looked for a way in. Another scream. The voices were undeniably coming from within. I found an unlocked door on the side opposite of where I’d started, turned the metal knob, pushed the door in, and stepped beyond the threshold. A feeling of unease worked its way up my body and I found myself trembling. I held the gun out in front of me as I probed through the shadows.
“What do you want with me?!” The female voice of the pair screamed out from somewhere unseen.
“You know something,” The male voice seemed to be restraining its excitement, “I don’t really know why I dragged you here. You’re not germane to the purpose of my being here. Maybe I shall rid myself of you.”
I turned a corner at the end of a rack of stacked boxes. Now I could see them; there was a black haired man, his raiment the high quality suit of a CEO of a big company, towering over a frightened girl. I saw her blond hair in the lamplight, but the tall man pervaded my view and blocked her from sight.
Staying in the shadows and out of the circles of light produced by the metal-brimmed lamps high above, I tried to move closer; I’m clumsy, or at least not very aware of my surroundings. I knocked over an empty beer can and it made noises like I never thought a little aluminum can ever could. I cringed at the sound of it. When I looked back at the two, the man had turned and was looking me dead in the eyes, his red eyes burning mine. Crimson bled out from his optics and down his face, dripping off his chin onto the floor and his high-quality suit. He came at me swiftly, his long ragged hair tailing after him like wisps of smoke, stopping as his face was mere inches from mine. The sclera of his eyes was black, or rather a dark milky gray, the irises were redder than any blood. His smile was tearing his face from ear to ear.
He pushed me back and I tripped over a leg he’d hooked around mine, I hit the floor and lost my breath, and he spoke, softly and intently to me, “Hello.” His knee dug into my chest as he kneeled, effectively pinning me to the ground and choking me. I coughed. He held my face in a rough hand, it reminded me of Dad’s hands when he would grab me at the throat. “If it isn’t you, Aili, little flower. Your timing couldn’t have been any more impeccable, I must say.”
I pressed the barrel of the gun against the side of his head, my finger squeezed the trigger, unflinching and unhesitant. Nothing. I was too ******** stupid, even for my standards. There was no magazine in the frame. No bullets in the damned thing. I had been so damned sure that there was a magazine in it when I left the house. ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid. Now you’re gonna die, you ******** idiot!’
Before I could even react, a cylindrical length of rusted metal protruded from the man’s throat, gushing blood as it broke the skin, and it had almost pierced my chest. The man coughed and gagged, loosing his knee from my chest, I grabbed his arm and kicked him off of me. That girl stood before me shaking as she let go of the pipe, leaving it in the man’s neck. I coughed as I tried to breathe again. I looked at the blood that had sprayed all over my shirt and my favorite jacket. “What the ********, this was my favorite ******** jacket!” I chided the girl who’d probably just saved my life. She said nothing. Her eyes were not looking into mine, fearful and affixed on something beyond me.
I turned a one-eighty and saw the man get up with a pipe through his neck, blood still gushing from the wound. He was getting up. With a pipe. In his neck. And the smile, ripping across his face from ear to ear, turned into a hoarse cackle. He grabbed the length of pipe that was protruding through the front of his neck and proceeded to pull the rest of it through his neck, his cacophony of malevolent laughter adding to the disturbing spectacle before that dumb girl and I. Tossing the bloody pipe to the side, he looked at the two of us, looked at me.
“How ‘bout a magic trick?” He asked in a hoarse voice, the hole in his neck producing blood with every word he spoke. Sliding his hand over the hole in his neck, he made the hole disappear, replaced completely with flesh. “Ta-da!” He bowed, smiling that evil smile.
“What the ********?!”
“You wanna see what else I have up my sleeves?”
“Who, or what, the ******** are you?!”
“The man rose like a monolith among the mass of corpses and would-be-cadavers, seeming taller than any mountain. He stood tall, surrounded by his companions, now all dead or dying, his head held high as fire ravaged the world before him.” In less time than it took to blink, he made his way between me and the dumb girl. I saw his fist dig into her gut before she flew into a wall, screaming with the air the impact had forced from her lungs. I stepped back. I tried. I couldn’t move. I was shaking. I was scared. I was terrified. I was crying. I was going to die.
Why had I come here? I shouldn’t have come here. I’m too damn curious for my own damn good. Curiosity killed the cat, and now it was going to kill me too.
“Now,” the mad man began as he walked a circle around me, “there’s a choice here. You see, I could kill the both of you right here, right now. But, that wouldn’t exactly serve any reason. I need you alive, Aiongo, flower. As for her,” He gestured over his shoulder at the girl lying on the floor, struggling to look up at the two of us, “As for her, well, she really has no purpose. But to make things fun, I’m giving you the power of God. You can choose either to save yourself, and let her die, or you can save her and sacrifice your own life,” He grabbed my arm, his rough hands as cold as graves, “Already, you’ve let an innocent suffer death, killed your own sister.”
“How the hell did you—”
“You can choose to save this one and let retribution take its course, or you can let her die.”
The girl on the floor, struggling to hold herself up, looked at me with her eyes. I saw the fear that had overtaken them, and the tears that turned them to glass. She coughed up blood onto the ground. “I didn’t give a s**t about my sister,” I looked right into those pathetic eyes, “and I don’t give a s**t about you.”
The man released my arm. I dropped to the floor and watched as he danced lithely over to the dumb girl. I saw the fear plastered on her face as she was lifted in the air by her shirt, she was so pathetic she couldn’t even struggle to free herself, just hung lamely in the air. He slammed her against the wall, she screamed. I covered my ears. That scream. It hurt me. It shouldn’t have, I didn’t even know the girl. She screamed again, I pressed my hands to my ears harder.
“I don’t wanna die!! Please, someone help me!” I felt my gut twist in sickening terror. I could have helped her. But why would I? She wasn’t family, she wasn’t a friend, she wasn’t even an acquaintance. But still, I felt my stomach wrenching inside me. I couldn’t let her die. I could have helped her. I still can. I’m not about to have any blood on my hands and I won’t suffer any guilt.
I got up off of the floor and felt something prodding me in the side. I reached into my jacket pocket and produced a magazine for a handgun. ‘Oh gee, could my luck be any worse?!’ I must have hit the magazine release on the gun when it was in my pocket. ******** terrific. I found the gun.
The man was torturing her. I watched as he tore out her right eye and she screamed so horribly, I felt like dying. He sliced long, terrible lacerations across her body.
I slid the magazine into the frame and felt it lock into place with a satisfactory CLICK! I pulled the slide back and let it go, loading a round into the barrel, ready to disintegrate anything in its explosive path. I stepped over to the man, placed the barrel against the back of his head.
“Abra cadabra ********.”
I squeezed the trigger, the barrel flared, the slide flew back ejecting the spent casing, and the bullet destroyed a path through his head and exploded, in a gory fashion, out of his face. It was all so slow, it felt so unreal. The faceless corpse collapsed on the floor, as did the dumb girl it had been holding high. The corpse laughed—it ******** laughed—that mad cackle as it suddenly began to melt into nothing. I stood there, too shocked to move. A cough.
I looked down at the girl lying in a small, but growing puddle of her own crimson gore, her skin was paling fast. I picked her up as carefully as I could and made my way to the hospital, luckily it was not far from here. Four blocks, if I remembered right.
I look back on it now and wonder why I hadn’t used my cellular to call emergency services. I ran through the sliding doors of the emergency room, blood dripping from my arms and clothes.
“SOMEONE HELP!!! SHE’S DYING!!” I shouted as loudly as I could while trying to catch my breath. It wasn’t long before a few people in scrubs ran over to me with a gurney, took the girl from my arms, placed her on the gurney and wheeled her into the back rooms. I made an effort to follow them, but was denied access by a nurse. I was forced back out into the waiting room. I found an empty chair and sat. I couldn’t care less that my head was throbbing, or that my favorite jacket was covered in blood, some of it mine, and some of it hers. I sat and wondered if the dumb girl was going to be alright, seeing all that blood did not reassure me. I held my head in my hands and rubbed my temples. My head was killing me.
Ten minutes. Ten long, monotonous minutes that seemed to be an eternity, a man in scrubs and a surgical mask came up to me. “Are you the one who brought in the girl in, the one without an eye?”
“Uh, yeah, that’s me.”
The man took me into an empty patient room and asked me what had happened to that dumb girl. I explained, as best I could without sounding crazy. “Well,” I started, “I was walking down the street when I heard screams,” That part was true, “so I followed the screams into a warehouse. And when I went inside, I found the girl lying on the floor in her own blood. Then, I was attacked myself. Some guy tried to grab me from behind. I managed to fight him off and he ran away.” No one would believe me about a man who regenerated a hole in his neck and dissolved into nothing.
“Did you get a good look at him?”
“No, I didn’t. The guy was wearing a hood over his head.”
The man, who I presumed was a doctor and not a nurse, nodded his head in solemn understanding. He quickly looked me over for injuries, patching up the few that I had, including a burn on my arm, ‘That man had burned my arm just by grabbing me?!’ I hadn’t even felt the singing feeling until now, adrenaline must of blinded me from noticing it. That man wasn’t human. He wasn’t dead. I knew I’d see him again, and the thought of our next encounter scared me. He had spoken a part of that old bedtime story my father used to tell me when I was little. How the hell he knew that story was a mystery to me, unless he’d known my father, unless he’d been part of it. But that story wasn’t true, it wasn’t real. Maybe, just maybe if I hadn’t strangled my sister, Dad might have been willing to further clue me in on just what the hell had happened.
“How did you get these, here?” He motioned to the burn marks on my forearm.
I shook my head, “I-I don’t know.”
The man proceeded to apply a relieving salve on the burns and then coiled a bandage around my arm. He started to talk about the dumb girl I’d brought in. “That girl you carried in here, she’s very very lucky you got her here when you did. Lost a lot of blood,”
No s**t, Sherlock.
“A missing eye, a lot of stitches…” He sighed before continuing,
“We managed to stabilize her condition and she seems to be doing fine. But there’s no real guarantee she’s going to come out of this. She’s in a very bad way right now.”
No s**t.
The man in scrubs told me I could leave if I wanted, since I was not her family. He said I did a good thing, saving her and bringing her here like I had. ********. I never do good things. Never. I had killed my baby sister for god’s sake. And I wasn’t about to leave. I had questions for that dumb girl, chances are she probably knew more about what had just happened than I did. I sat, in the flimsy, loose-fitting hospital gown the man had offered me; my clothes had been soaked with blood, and it wasn’t going to wash out. I was going to miss that jacket, it was my favorite one.
I waited in the E.R. waiting room, in the thin, threadbare hospital gown, trying not to be self-conscious about the fact that I was completely naked underneath, and waited impatiently for the doctor to come back out and get me. As I sat, I suddenly realized that I was famished, my stomach roared like a lion at me. There wouldn’t be any food in the ******** E.R.! And so I just continued to sit, naked under that threadbare hospital gown, starving. It took forever, or at least a span of time that felt like forever for the doctor to come out again. He eyed me in the chair, walked over and sat next to me. He was tapping his pen against the plastic clipboard he held, it was annoying.
“What’s up doc?”
“Come with me.” He said curtly, I grabbed my bags and quickly followed him down the linoleum-floored hallway and stood outside of a room in the ICU section.
I saw the poor girl through the room windows. She looked damned pathetic lying in that bed with all of those tubes attached to her. I almost thought I felt sorry for her.
“Well,” He started, he seemed to be fishing around his head for what to say,
“It’s a good thing you decided to stay. She seems to have no immediate family or relatives we can contact. We don’t even know her name. But what has me at a worry, and I doubt it’s of any relevance to you, is that—Well, you see, it’s standard procedure for us to look through a patients clothes for any form of identification. When we went through her clothes, she had none.”
“Why does this matter at all?” I was perplexed because I didn’t see where he was going with this.
“You see. We, uh, we found a DNR in her pocket. It is a legitimate DNR, legal and with all legitimate signatures and witnesses.”
I shook my head in absolute confusion. I knew that it clearly wasn’t a good thing considering the doctor’s grave expression.
“Okay, well then, what the hell’s a DNR?”
“A DNR is a legal document that instructs us not to resuscitate a person should they go into cardiac arrest.” He was looking at me with a genuine nervousness.
I probably looked as nervous, though I’d always thought myself a good actor.
“So,” I tried to get it straight,
“If her heart stops, you’re not going to help her? You’re just going to let her die,” I looked at him as he nodded solemnly,
“But it needs to be legitimate, right. It can’t be legitimate if it’s not from a hospital right? I mean, you can’t accept it unless it was given by this hospital.” I turned to the doctor trying to look as authoritative as I could though I was nearly a foot shorter than him, and fixed a look of bitter disappointment.
“Well, that is essentially what is required of us. Now, with all optimism we shouldn’t have to reach that point, but her body and her mind have gone through some severe trauma and shock, and it is a likely possibility that she could go into arrest.”
“You listen here and you listen to me good, alright,” I poked the man in the chest with my finger, “She can’t die, and if you won’t try to help her from dying, I sure as hell will do everything I can to make sure she doesn’t die, DNR be ********. I need her.” I was shocked at myself, shocked at just how fluidly that last statement rolled off my tongue, smoothly like honey. I never need anyone, but maybe she had some knowledge as to what had just happened.
“I need her alive. She cannot die, and I’m not going to let you let her die.” I really was getting confused by the words that were coming from my mouth. I don’t know why I was so fervently protective of her life, at least what would remain of it. I think about it, and maybe it’s because I was guilty, guilty for what had happened to her, responsible for the torture she had been through in that warehouse last night at the hands of that inhuman monster. I think it was my fault. It was my fault.
“I understand and,” He leaned towards me and whispered, “I don’t approve of DNR’s myself.” He sighed and continued, “Fine, she will be here for a while though, you understand.” He turned and walked away.
“Sorry,” I mouthed silently as I watched him walk down the hall, “for ruffling your feathers, Doctor Birdie.”
I pushed the door open into the room. Setting my bags down against a wall, I took a seat in one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs occupying the room. The semi-silent hum of the machines hooked up to her, followed by the sequentially consistent beeping of the heart rate monitor, filled the room with a rather lonely ambience. As I sat in that uncomfortable chair, the fatigue caused by recent events finally caught up with me, and hit me hard like a train. Before I even realized it, my head was in my hand as I tried to find a comfortable position to fall asleep in. “C’mon, you dumb girl, wake up already.” I stared at her as she was drifting peacefully in a drug-induced slumber.
My head still in my hand, I pulled out my cell phone and decided to text message my friend, Benjamin, though he much rather prefers to be called Kuiper—like the asteroid belt of which I’m sure none of you have ever heard.
Allo. Im in the hospital rite now.
A couple minutes later, my phone WHIRRED in my hand. I flipped it open and read his reply:
OMG. Wut Happnd?! R u ok?!?!?
I snickered at the thought of messing around with him.
I got into a car collision. I’m really hurt. Not sure I can go back to school netime soon
Well, at least that would give me a bit of an excuse to not show up to that damned, mind-numbing prison of an educational facility.
OMGOMGOMG!! OMFG!! Get betr soon, k?
Damn, I really mean. But if he’s gullible enough to believe that I can text him after getting into a bad accident, he kind of deserves to be screwed with. I left the conversation up in the air, or, more appropriately, at the bottom of my messenger bag, the phone off. I also switched off my Ipod and put it in the bag too. I sat in the plastic chair hugging my knees to my chest, trying in vain to keep warm, enveloped by the solitary ambience permeating the room. The only person in here, other than my own self, was the dumb girl, unconscious and comatose on drugs, hooked into machines. Her heart rate jumped a few times, and I jumped up each time, relieved to find that it was never a heart attack or anything worse.
It must have been a few hours later, while I was drifting in and out of sleep, dipping my foot on each side of the fence, when she woke up. She turned her head to look at me with her one eye, the area where her right eye had been now covered in gauze and bandages. It scared me, her expression as she looked to me, like she was dead. Her face was pale, and her one eye was underlined by a stitch that crept like a retributive grin across her cheek, there to remind me of what I had caused. I shook myself awake, and moved my chair closer to her bedside.
“Hi.” I tried to sound as genuinely joyful as I could.
She didn’t say anything in reply. Maybe she really was dumb.
“I’m, uh, I’m relieved to see that you’re okay. You really weren’t looking too good when I brought you in.”
Silence seemed to be the only reply she would give me.
“Do you know who that guy was, or what he was?”
I dropped the faux genuine pleasantries. She knew what I was talking about. And she looked at me in the eyes and mouthed a solemn ‘no’. She really had nothing at all to do what had happened, and the guilt of it hit me hard. It felt like someone had thrown a piano over my back and expected me to hold it up. It was crushing.
“Do you? Know anything?” Her voice was so weak and pathetic I barely heard her question. I almost hadn’t even noticed it was her talking. I was surprised to hear her speaking at all, especially in the state she was in. I paused and shook my head in reply.
“At least, I don’t think I know.”
My memory brought me back to the story that my dad used to tell me when I was little. The girl’s expression couldn’t have become any more sullen, she groaned as she tried to move herself into a sitting position. “Don’t move,” I pushed her back with my hand, “you shouldn’t be moving. You don’t want to open up some of those wounds.” And she looked at me with such a confused and perplexed expression, though in her eye I saw nothing but melancholy.
“What-what if I want to?”
“What? What did you just say?” I was quite taken aback at her reply.
Nobody would want to be in such pain and suffering. Nobody should want that.
“Why?” She looked back down at her hands, clasped together in her lap so tightly they were turning white.
I couldn’t see her one eye as she looked down, only the bandage around the area where her right eye once was.
“Do you want to die or something,” I asked, that morose visage was beginning to aggravate me, “Hey,” I grabbed the Dumb Girl by her shoulders and forced her to face me, “why do you want to die?!”
Her eye still trying as hard as it could to avert its gaze from me, looking anywhere but at me, I found myself growing ever more cross with her.
“Why?!”
Her eye affixed itself on me and my heart skipped a beat, or two. She looked straight at me; that bloodied bandage covering the place where her right eye had once been. And that deep green emerald eye gazing at me. I fell back in my chair, suddenly overcome with the guilt, enveloped by the sadness, the grief, the pain, the anger, all mixed within the beautiful glassy ocular that stared back at me. I could feel it all as she looked into my eyes.
“Don’t act like you know me.”
She was right. I was nothing but a stranger to her, as she was with me. I had only gotten her involved in a possibly family-related act of violence, and had brought her here to the hospital, where she now lay before me, pathetic and half-dead. I only had tried to save her life.
“I’m- I’m sorry, I guess I shouldn’t have—”
“—forget about it.” She cut me off swiftly.
Silence over took the room, and it was without a doubt awkward. I looked around the room, at the machines, at the door, at the windows, and down at my feet, trying to think of a way to break the silence. She just stared down at her hands.
“Um, so,” I started, “you have a name?”
“Yeah.”
“…And that would be…?”
“… Sunya.”
“I’m Aili,” I told her, though she did not ask for my name, “do you go to school around here?”
“Locke.”
“I go there too. Strange I’ve never seen you before,” not really though, it was a pretty huge school, “shitty cafeteria, right?”
I thought I saw the traces of a smile crack her face for a moment, but before a blink, it was gone. This forced casual conversation didn’t persist for much longer, there were simply too few things I could pull out of my a** to keep it going. But it was pretty interesting how easy it seemed for me to talk with a dying girl I cared nothing about. But it seemed much harder for her to talk back.
“He-he just grabbed me off the street,” She interjected into the awkward silence that had followed our casual talk, “Told me he’d kill me if I screamed for help, or if some girl didn’t show up. I guess he meant if you didn’t show up,” she looked at me, “and when I think about it, I probably ought to have died. I don’t want this.”
This Dumb Girl, Sunya, was making no sense, at least not from where I saw it. Last night, when she was being mutilated by that monster of a man, or thing, she had been screaming, she had been crying, she had said she didn’t want to die. But now, she wishes she were? Was it the pain she was still feeling, or it could be that she felt the stitches and scars had transformed her into a monster.
They didn’t.
“But you had been screaming that you didn’t want to die. Why, now, do you want to die? Why do you wish you’d died?”
The girl turned and looked out the window that was behind me, her one emerald eye still glassy with the welling up of tears. “I’m- I’m nothing but a coward.”
“No, anyone would have acted how you did, had they been tortured like that.” I didn’t feel like my words were very comforting.
“Because I’m a coward…” I saw the look in that emerald-glinted, porcelain eye, self-pity, self-hatred, misery and grief. And I found myself hating her because of all that I saw in that eye of hers. Within a quiet moment, I realized that what I saw enveloped in her eye, was me.
“You’re not a coward,” I told her, lying right to her scarred face, “Nobody really wants to die. People… People… I know, people who’ve died, “I tried with all the will left in my fatigued mind to separate myself from that memory, that feeling,
“they didn’t really want to die, even… even when they said it was what they really wanted.”
The sad girl looked at me as though I knew nothing, understood nothing, her one deep jade ocular fixed on me, seeming confused at my words, shimmering, a dam about to burst and loose all the grief and anguish she’s endured. And now, I found myself curious, just how much pain had this girl endured? Then again, did it really matter? Would it have any effect on what had happened to us last night? Would it change the sad, sad fact that maybe, just maybe there’s a murderous inhuman monster looking to maim or kill me? Somehow I doubt it would. And yet, I still found myself wondering if I could ever really understand just how much pain this girl, Sunya, had been through.
She closed her singular green eye, and relaxed herself back down on the bed, shuffling to find a comfortable position in which to fall back into a corpse like slumber. The drugs must be hell on her system. I watched as it took her mere seconds to go from so emotional and excitable to peacefully asleep without a worry in the world. I wish I had some drugs to help me sleep too.
Come to think of it, I was still pretty damn tired. I moved the back of my chair against the far wall from the bed. Grabbing another chair, I faced it open-end toward the chair against the wall, something to prop my legs upon. Those chairs still weren’t very comfortable, but I was tired enough that I didn’t really give a damn. Slouching in one chair, my feet in the other, I attempted, once again to sleep. I couldn’t, sleep that is; I couldn’t fall asleep. Tired as I was, I couldn’t bring my mind to stop racing through chains of thoughts and ideas, memories and ponderings. My body was telling my mind to ******** off and get some rest, but it wouldn’t, it wanted everything that had occurred to make sense become understandable.
Looking up at the circular wall clock that hung on the wall opposite the bed, it looked to read 4:17. It was too damn early to be awake. I told my mind to stop, or rather it just stopped on its own, like a good brain. But one last curiosity, one last thought, ran through my head before everything went black.
‘Does my father even care that I’m gone?’
I wake up 9 years later and only now start to realize that the story he’d told me that night just might be true. It didn’t hit me like a truck, it wasn’t fast, it wasn’t quick and gut-wrenching. The revelation hit me hard, and it hit me slow. It was the kind of slow that is so slow you can hardly tell that it’s moving; iceberg slow.
I plugged my nice little headphones into my MP3 player, not listening quite intently to the music, but enjoying the noise it produced compared to the sounds of my baby sister. Listening to the music, I traipsed around the house, cleaning this and that, here and there; doing all the household chores that father would neglect. I could hear her, even with the headphones on, my sister’s whines coming from the back room.
“Baby, don’t you know, daddy doesn’t give a ******** about you.
Baby don’t you know, I don’t give a ******** about you either.”
I could imagine what would have happened had I said that and Dad were home to hear it. Thankfully, he wasn’t. He was out working, yeah, working. He was out working his way to the bottom of a bottle, the lethargic drinking ********. The way I figured, his job was to be the sleazy-drunk-guy-in-the-back-booth-that-wasted-his-life-in-the-bottle. It was a full-time employment.
If he’d heard me say he didn’t give a ******** about my baby sister—the truth, that is—he probably would have struck me across the face in his drunken stupor. Really. Hard. He never really did it for no reason at all, so I guess it can’t be called abuse, but only when I would get out of hand.
I think he was always so harsh. I think he was so harsh because he never settled down, not even after Mom had my sister and I. He remained a wild, untamed mustang. He wouldn’t be broken and he’d kick and buck, fighting for control against the flow of a normal society and a tame lifestyle. I think that’s why she left us. I think that’s why mom left him, because he wasn’t ready yet, to devote himself to his family—too busy devoting himself to the bottle—and he was too uncontrollable. He didn’t care about my sister, I’m willing to bet he didn’t care about me, and sometimes I have to wonder if he ever cared about Mom. Why did I not care? Why was I okay with it? Maybe I was okay with it because I was just like him; I didn’t care and I think I hated myself for it.
I put away the power vacuum cleaner, picked my little sister up from the back room, brought her out to the living room. I fed her. She still whined. I checked her diaper, nothing there. I rocked her back and forth in my arms. She still whined. I put her back in the crib and gave her a pacifier; she spit the thing out and hit me right in the face.
Jesus ******** I hate children.
‘Forget about it,’ I thought, ‘I’ll just let her scream herself into catatonia or some such similar condition.’ I decided I would spend some time over at a friend’s house to get away from the shrill, annoying whines of that damnable little thing; it wasn’t like Dad was going to be home anytime soon to find out I’d left her all alone and unattended.
I snatched my jacket off of the clothes hook on the back of my door—my favorite jacket; it was a dark gray piece with a large black stripe running up the right sleeve—, a few of the thin peach cigars my dad had spread out around his desk along with my pink and black zebra-striped zippo. I threw my jacket on, stuffed the cigars and zippo into the jacket pockets and headed for the front door.
“Ah, ow…”
My head, it started throbbing like someone was beating a bass drum inside of it. Everything started getting blurry. I felt something mellifluous flowing from my eyes. I don’t think I was crying but it was some kind of fluid. I stopped and rubbed away some of the stuff with the back of my hand. I was right, I wasn’t crying. At least, I wasn’t crying tears.
“What the hell is this?” My vision started blurring even worse, I almost couldn’t see. I groped blindly around the kitchen where I thought the phone would be, knocking it off the hook and onto the floor. I hunched over on all fours and grabbed the phone and tried to dial the emergency number. The phone beeped as I pressed what I thought was the ‘9’ button, and beeped again as I pressed ‘1’. And then everything went black. But, and I thought I heard it, there was a voice, and it said,
“Hello.”
I awoke, later, though how much later I couldn’t tell at first. What roused me must have been the all too familiar shouting of an irate, panicked father. Once my vision cleared, I saw his rage was directed at me. And I saw him standing over the small, unmoving form of my sister. Her face was blue, and her little chest did not rise with inhalation or fall with exhalation.
I think it took everything he had to keep himself calm and from seriously hurting me. His face was cherry red and his eyes were red from crying when he told me, between heaving sobs, to leave and never come back. I did well to listen. I was a good girl. I got my messenger bag, filled a tote bag with clothes. I then proceeded to take Dad’s secret store of cash he had hidden away in a hollow book, and the handgun he kept in a desk drawer. He was far too busy freaking out over my sister, or rather, what used to be my sister lying on the living room floor, wondering what the hell he was going to do. I knew what the hell I was going to do, and it started with getting out of here. So I left, messenger bag and tote hung over my shoulder, enough cash to last me a few months if I was careful in a zippered inner pocket of the bag, MP3 player playing soothing melodies in my ear, and the gun in my jacket pocket.
The sober drunk followed me to the door, cradled in his arms, wrapped in blankets, was his precious little baby girl. I saw him drop the mass into the trash bin. Real precious.
I turned the corner of the cul-de-sac, produced one of the peach cigars I’d filched from Dad’s room, held it in my mouth, lit it with the pink and black zebra striped zippo, and took a nice deep drag. Damn, these are some fine cigars. I exhaled a puff of gray into the crisp, black night sky. It smelled peachy.
‘Why the hell is he kicking me out? I didn’t do a damned thing.” I walked down the sidewalk, lit only by the ugly orange of the sodium street lights, letting the cigar hang loosely between my lips. Then I pondered to myself. ‘What if I did do it; killed her? What if it had been my hands around that tiny little neck of hers?’ The sodium lamps flickered above me. A chill crawled slowly up my spine, I wrapped my hand tightly around the grip of the handgun.
I managed to make my way into the city before the clock struck midnight, which is just outside of the small suburban offshoot of a as it town where a home that was no longer mine sat with a drunkard inside. Something about the city helped reassure my sense of safety, as odd may be for most people. Even with its dark, dank alleys, too-sharp corners, and unexpected dead ends, I felt inescapably safe.
Now, when the city was asleep, save for the occasional car rocketing by, leaving behind bright streaks of red from its taillights, I felt alone. I felt as alone as the last man on earth and that nothing could change that, I wanted nothing to change that. I turned into an empty alleyway and let myself fall softly on the hard ground and the brick wall. When I sat, fatigue finally came like a tidal wave through my body. I put out the stub of the peach cigar, flicked it down the alley, held my bags tight between my chest and legs, and before I knew it, I’d fallen asleep.
It might have been three hours, maybe it had been four, since I’d passed out, I couldn’t tell for there were no signs of the dawn on the horizon. I hadn’t slept very well. What roused me from sleep were the voices echoing in the walls of the alleyway, too loud to be ignored. I found that it was quite difficult to get up still-half asleep and fell over in the attempt. Now alert after kissing pavement, gross disease ridden alley-pavement, I jumped up and went further down the alleyway, where the voices were coming from, to investigate. Not a smart idea, I’m just a dumb 16-year-old girl with a handgun in her jacket, but it would be more interesting than sitting around doing nothing. The conversation between the pair of voices turned to loud screaming. I withdrew the gun from my jacket and began to sprint down to the origin of the voices. I came upon a large warehouse and, slipping through a hole in the guard fence, I looked for a way in. Another scream. The voices were undeniably coming from within. I found an unlocked door on the side opposite of where I’d started, turned the metal knob, pushed the door in, and stepped beyond the threshold. A feeling of unease worked its way up my body and I found myself trembling. I held the gun out in front of me as I probed through the shadows.
“What do you want with me?!” The female voice of the pair screamed out from somewhere unseen.
“You know something,” The male voice seemed to be restraining its excitement, “I don’t really know why I dragged you here. You’re not germane to the purpose of my being here. Maybe I shall rid myself of you.”
I turned a corner at the end of a rack of stacked boxes. Now I could see them; there was a black haired man, his raiment the high quality suit of a CEO of a big company, towering over a frightened girl. I saw her blond hair in the lamplight, but the tall man pervaded my view and blocked her from sight.
Staying in the shadows and out of the circles of light produced by the metal-brimmed lamps high above, I tried to move closer; I’m clumsy, or at least not very aware of my surroundings. I knocked over an empty beer can and it made noises like I never thought a little aluminum can ever could. I cringed at the sound of it. When I looked back at the two, the man had turned and was looking me dead in the eyes, his red eyes burning mine. Crimson bled out from his optics and down his face, dripping off his chin onto the floor and his high-quality suit. He came at me swiftly, his long ragged hair tailing after him like wisps of smoke, stopping as his face was mere inches from mine. The sclera of his eyes was black, or rather a dark milky gray, the irises were redder than any blood. His smile was tearing his face from ear to ear.
He pushed me back and I tripped over a leg he’d hooked around mine, I hit the floor and lost my breath, and he spoke, softly and intently to me, “Hello.” His knee dug into my chest as he kneeled, effectively pinning me to the ground and choking me. I coughed. He held my face in a rough hand, it reminded me of Dad’s hands when he would grab me at the throat. “If it isn’t you, Aili, little flower. Your timing couldn’t have been any more impeccable, I must say.”
I pressed the barrel of the gun against the side of his head, my finger squeezed the trigger, unflinching and unhesitant. Nothing. I was too ******** stupid, even for my standards. There was no magazine in the frame. No bullets in the damned thing. I had been so damned sure that there was a magazine in it when I left the house. ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid. Now you’re gonna die, you ******** idiot!’
Before I could even react, a cylindrical length of rusted metal protruded from the man’s throat, gushing blood as it broke the skin, and it had almost pierced my chest. The man coughed and gagged, loosing his knee from my chest, I grabbed his arm and kicked him off of me. That girl stood before me shaking as she let go of the pipe, leaving it in the man’s neck. I coughed as I tried to breathe again. I looked at the blood that had sprayed all over my shirt and my favorite jacket. “What the ********, this was my favorite ******** jacket!” I chided the girl who’d probably just saved my life. She said nothing. Her eyes were not looking into mine, fearful and affixed on something beyond me.
I turned a one-eighty and saw the man get up with a pipe through his neck, blood still gushing from the wound. He was getting up. With a pipe. In his neck. And the smile, ripping across his face from ear to ear, turned into a hoarse cackle. He grabbed the length of pipe that was protruding through the front of his neck and proceeded to pull the rest of it through his neck, his cacophony of malevolent laughter adding to the disturbing spectacle before that dumb girl and I. Tossing the bloody pipe to the side, he looked at the two of us, looked at me.
“How ‘bout a magic trick?” He asked in a hoarse voice, the hole in his neck producing blood with every word he spoke. Sliding his hand over the hole in his neck, he made the hole disappear, replaced completely with flesh. “Ta-da!” He bowed, smiling that evil smile.
“What the ********?!”
“You wanna see what else I have up my sleeves?”
“Who, or what, the ******** are you?!”
“The man rose like a monolith among the mass of corpses and would-be-cadavers, seeming taller than any mountain. He stood tall, surrounded by his companions, now all dead or dying, his head held high as fire ravaged the world before him.” In less time than it took to blink, he made his way between me and the dumb girl. I saw his fist dig into her gut before she flew into a wall, screaming with the air the impact had forced from her lungs. I stepped back. I tried. I couldn’t move. I was shaking. I was scared. I was terrified. I was crying. I was going to die.
Why had I come here? I shouldn’t have come here. I’m too damn curious for my own damn good. Curiosity killed the cat, and now it was going to kill me too.
“Now,” the mad man began as he walked a circle around me, “there’s a choice here. You see, I could kill the both of you right here, right now. But, that wouldn’t exactly serve any reason. I need you alive, Aiongo, flower. As for her,” He gestured over his shoulder at the girl lying on the floor, struggling to look up at the two of us, “As for her, well, she really has no purpose. But to make things fun, I’m giving you the power of God. You can choose either to save yourself, and let her die, or you can save her and sacrifice your own life,” He grabbed my arm, his rough hands as cold as graves, “Already, you’ve let an innocent suffer death, killed your own sister.”
“How the hell did you—”
“You can choose to save this one and let retribution take its course, or you can let her die.”
The girl on the floor, struggling to hold herself up, looked at me with her eyes. I saw the fear that had overtaken them, and the tears that turned them to glass. She coughed up blood onto the ground. “I didn’t give a s**t about my sister,” I looked right into those pathetic eyes, “and I don’t give a s**t about you.”
The man released my arm. I dropped to the floor and watched as he danced lithely over to the dumb girl. I saw the fear plastered on her face as she was lifted in the air by her shirt, she was so pathetic she couldn’t even struggle to free herself, just hung lamely in the air. He slammed her against the wall, she screamed. I covered my ears. That scream. It hurt me. It shouldn’t have, I didn’t even know the girl. She screamed again, I pressed my hands to my ears harder.
“I don’t wanna die!! Please, someone help me!” I felt my gut twist in sickening terror. I could have helped her. But why would I? She wasn’t family, she wasn’t a friend, she wasn’t even an acquaintance. But still, I felt my stomach wrenching inside me. I couldn’t let her die. I could have helped her. I still can. I’m not about to have any blood on my hands and I won’t suffer any guilt.
I got up off of the floor and felt something prodding me in the side. I reached into my jacket pocket and produced a magazine for a handgun. ‘Oh gee, could my luck be any worse?!’ I must have hit the magazine release on the gun when it was in my pocket. ******** terrific. I found the gun.
The man was torturing her. I watched as he tore out her right eye and she screamed so horribly, I felt like dying. He sliced long, terrible lacerations across her body.
I slid the magazine into the frame and felt it lock into place with a satisfactory CLICK! I pulled the slide back and let it go, loading a round into the barrel, ready to disintegrate anything in its explosive path. I stepped over to the man, placed the barrel against the back of his head.
“Abra cadabra ********.”
I squeezed the trigger, the barrel flared, the slide flew back ejecting the spent casing, and the bullet destroyed a path through his head and exploded, in a gory fashion, out of his face. It was all so slow, it felt so unreal. The faceless corpse collapsed on the floor, as did the dumb girl it had been holding high. The corpse laughed—it ******** laughed—that mad cackle as it suddenly began to melt into nothing. I stood there, too shocked to move. A cough.
I looked down at the girl lying in a small, but growing puddle of her own crimson gore, her skin was paling fast. I picked her up as carefully as I could and made my way to the hospital, luckily it was not far from here. Four blocks, if I remembered right.
I look back on it now and wonder why I hadn’t used my cellular to call emergency services. I ran through the sliding doors of the emergency room, blood dripping from my arms and clothes.
“SOMEONE HELP!!! SHE’S DYING!!” I shouted as loudly as I could while trying to catch my breath. It wasn’t long before a few people in scrubs ran over to me with a gurney, took the girl from my arms, placed her on the gurney and wheeled her into the back rooms. I made an effort to follow them, but was denied access by a nurse. I was forced back out into the waiting room. I found an empty chair and sat. I couldn’t care less that my head was throbbing, or that my favorite jacket was covered in blood, some of it mine, and some of it hers. I sat and wondered if the dumb girl was going to be alright, seeing all that blood did not reassure me. I held my head in my hands and rubbed my temples. My head was killing me.
Ten minutes. Ten long, monotonous minutes that seemed to be an eternity, a man in scrubs and a surgical mask came up to me. “Are you the one who brought in the girl in, the one without an eye?”
“Uh, yeah, that’s me.”
The man took me into an empty patient room and asked me what had happened to that dumb girl. I explained, as best I could without sounding crazy. “Well,” I started, “I was walking down the street when I heard screams,” That part was true, “so I followed the screams into a warehouse. And when I went inside, I found the girl lying on the floor in her own blood. Then, I was attacked myself. Some guy tried to grab me from behind. I managed to fight him off and he ran away.” No one would believe me about a man who regenerated a hole in his neck and dissolved into nothing.
“Did you get a good look at him?”
“No, I didn’t. The guy was wearing a hood over his head.”
The man, who I presumed was a doctor and not a nurse, nodded his head in solemn understanding. He quickly looked me over for injuries, patching up the few that I had, including a burn on my arm, ‘That man had burned my arm just by grabbing me?!’ I hadn’t even felt the singing feeling until now, adrenaline must of blinded me from noticing it. That man wasn’t human. He wasn’t dead. I knew I’d see him again, and the thought of our next encounter scared me. He had spoken a part of that old bedtime story my father used to tell me when I was little. How the hell he knew that story was a mystery to me, unless he’d known my father, unless he’d been part of it. But that story wasn’t true, it wasn’t real. Maybe, just maybe if I hadn’t strangled my sister, Dad might have been willing to further clue me in on just what the hell had happened.
“How did you get these, here?” He motioned to the burn marks on my forearm.
I shook my head, “I-I don’t know.”
The man proceeded to apply a relieving salve on the burns and then coiled a bandage around my arm. He started to talk about the dumb girl I’d brought in. “That girl you carried in here, she’s very very lucky you got her here when you did. Lost a lot of blood,”
No s**t, Sherlock.
“A missing eye, a lot of stitches…” He sighed before continuing,
“We managed to stabilize her condition and she seems to be doing fine. But there’s no real guarantee she’s going to come out of this. She’s in a very bad way right now.”
No s**t.
The man in scrubs told me I could leave if I wanted, since I was not her family. He said I did a good thing, saving her and bringing her here like I had. ********. I never do good things. Never. I had killed my baby sister for god’s sake. And I wasn’t about to leave. I had questions for that dumb girl, chances are she probably knew more about what had just happened than I did. I sat, in the flimsy, loose-fitting hospital gown the man had offered me; my clothes had been soaked with blood, and it wasn’t going to wash out. I was going to miss that jacket, it was my favorite one.
I waited in the E.R. waiting room, in the thin, threadbare hospital gown, trying not to be self-conscious about the fact that I was completely naked underneath, and waited impatiently for the doctor to come back out and get me. As I sat, I suddenly realized that I was famished, my stomach roared like a lion at me. There wouldn’t be any food in the ******** E.R.! And so I just continued to sit, naked under that threadbare hospital gown, starving. It took forever, or at least a span of time that felt like forever for the doctor to come out again. He eyed me in the chair, walked over and sat next to me. He was tapping his pen against the plastic clipboard he held, it was annoying.
“What’s up doc?”
“Come with me.” He said curtly, I grabbed my bags and quickly followed him down the linoleum-floored hallway and stood outside of a room in the ICU section.
I saw the poor girl through the room windows. She looked damned pathetic lying in that bed with all of those tubes attached to her. I almost thought I felt sorry for her.
“Well,” He started, he seemed to be fishing around his head for what to say,
“It’s a good thing you decided to stay. She seems to have no immediate family or relatives we can contact. We don’t even know her name. But what has me at a worry, and I doubt it’s of any relevance to you, is that—Well, you see, it’s standard procedure for us to look through a patients clothes for any form of identification. When we went through her clothes, she had none.”
“Why does this matter at all?” I was perplexed because I didn’t see where he was going with this.
“You see. We, uh, we found a DNR in her pocket. It is a legitimate DNR, legal and with all legitimate signatures and witnesses.”
I shook my head in absolute confusion. I knew that it clearly wasn’t a good thing considering the doctor’s grave expression.
“Okay, well then, what the hell’s a DNR?”
“A DNR is a legal document that instructs us not to resuscitate a person should they go into cardiac arrest.” He was looking at me with a genuine nervousness.
I probably looked as nervous, though I’d always thought myself a good actor.
“So,” I tried to get it straight,
“If her heart stops, you’re not going to help her? You’re just going to let her die,” I looked at him as he nodded solemnly,
“But it needs to be legitimate, right. It can’t be legitimate if it’s not from a hospital right? I mean, you can’t accept it unless it was given by this hospital.” I turned to the doctor trying to look as authoritative as I could though I was nearly a foot shorter than him, and fixed a look of bitter disappointment.
“Well, that is essentially what is required of us. Now, with all optimism we shouldn’t have to reach that point, but her body and her mind have gone through some severe trauma and shock, and it is a likely possibility that she could go into arrest.”
“You listen here and you listen to me good, alright,” I poked the man in the chest with my finger, “She can’t die, and if you won’t try to help her from dying, I sure as hell will do everything I can to make sure she doesn’t die, DNR be ********. I need her.” I was shocked at myself, shocked at just how fluidly that last statement rolled off my tongue, smoothly like honey. I never need anyone, but maybe she had some knowledge as to what had just happened.
“I need her alive. She cannot die, and I’m not going to let you let her die.” I really was getting confused by the words that were coming from my mouth. I don’t know why I was so fervently protective of her life, at least what would remain of it. I think about it, and maybe it’s because I was guilty, guilty for what had happened to her, responsible for the torture she had been through in that warehouse last night at the hands of that inhuman monster. I think it was my fault. It was my fault.
“I understand and,” He leaned towards me and whispered, “I don’t approve of DNR’s myself.” He sighed and continued, “Fine, she will be here for a while though, you understand.” He turned and walked away.
“Sorry,” I mouthed silently as I watched him walk down the hall, “for ruffling your feathers, Doctor Birdie.”
I pushed the door open into the room. Setting my bags down against a wall, I took a seat in one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs occupying the room. The semi-silent hum of the machines hooked up to her, followed by the sequentially consistent beeping of the heart rate monitor, filled the room with a rather lonely ambience. As I sat in that uncomfortable chair, the fatigue caused by recent events finally caught up with me, and hit me hard like a train. Before I even realized it, my head was in my hand as I tried to find a comfortable position to fall asleep in. “C’mon, you dumb girl, wake up already.” I stared at her as she was drifting peacefully in a drug-induced slumber.
My head still in my hand, I pulled out my cell phone and decided to text message my friend, Benjamin, though he much rather prefers to be called Kuiper—like the asteroid belt of which I’m sure none of you have ever heard.
Allo. Im in the hospital rite now.
A couple minutes later, my phone WHIRRED in my hand. I flipped it open and read his reply:
OMG. Wut Happnd?! R u ok?!?!?
I snickered at the thought of messing around with him.
I got into a car collision. I’m really hurt. Not sure I can go back to school netime soon
Well, at least that would give me a bit of an excuse to not show up to that damned, mind-numbing prison of an educational facility.
OMGOMGOMG!! OMFG!! Get betr soon, k?
Damn, I really mean. But if he’s gullible enough to believe that I can text him after getting into a bad accident, he kind of deserves to be screwed with. I left the conversation up in the air, or, more appropriately, at the bottom of my messenger bag, the phone off. I also switched off my Ipod and put it in the bag too. I sat in the plastic chair hugging my knees to my chest, trying in vain to keep warm, enveloped by the solitary ambience permeating the room. The only person in here, other than my own self, was the dumb girl, unconscious and comatose on drugs, hooked into machines. Her heart rate jumped a few times, and I jumped up each time, relieved to find that it was never a heart attack or anything worse.
It must have been a few hours later, while I was drifting in and out of sleep, dipping my foot on each side of the fence, when she woke up. She turned her head to look at me with her one eye, the area where her right eye had been now covered in gauze and bandages. It scared me, her expression as she looked to me, like she was dead. Her face was pale, and her one eye was underlined by a stitch that crept like a retributive grin across her cheek, there to remind me of what I had caused. I shook myself awake, and moved my chair closer to her bedside.
“Hi.” I tried to sound as genuinely joyful as I could.
She didn’t say anything in reply. Maybe she really was dumb.
“I’m, uh, I’m relieved to see that you’re okay. You really weren’t looking too good when I brought you in.”
Silence seemed to be the only reply she would give me.
“Do you know who that guy was, or what he was?”
I dropped the faux genuine pleasantries. She knew what I was talking about. And she looked at me in the eyes and mouthed a solemn ‘no’. She really had nothing at all to do what had happened, and the guilt of it hit me hard. It felt like someone had thrown a piano over my back and expected me to hold it up. It was crushing.
“Do you? Know anything?” Her voice was so weak and pathetic I barely heard her question. I almost hadn’t even noticed it was her talking. I was surprised to hear her speaking at all, especially in the state she was in. I paused and shook my head in reply.
“At least, I don’t think I know.”
My memory brought me back to the story that my dad used to tell me when I was little. The girl’s expression couldn’t have become any more sullen, she groaned as she tried to move herself into a sitting position. “Don’t move,” I pushed her back with my hand, “you shouldn’t be moving. You don’t want to open up some of those wounds.” And she looked at me with such a confused and perplexed expression, though in her eye I saw nothing but melancholy.
“What-what if I want to?”
“What? What did you just say?” I was quite taken aback at her reply.
Nobody would want to be in such pain and suffering. Nobody should want that.
“Why?” She looked back down at her hands, clasped together in her lap so tightly they were turning white.
I couldn’t see her one eye as she looked down, only the bandage around the area where her right eye once was.
“Do you want to die or something,” I asked, that morose visage was beginning to aggravate me, “Hey,” I grabbed the Dumb Girl by her shoulders and forced her to face me, “why do you want to die?!”
Her eye still trying as hard as it could to avert its gaze from me, looking anywhere but at me, I found myself growing ever more cross with her.
“Why?!”
Her eye affixed itself on me and my heart skipped a beat, or two. She looked straight at me; that bloodied bandage covering the place where her right eye had once been. And that deep green emerald eye gazing at me. I fell back in my chair, suddenly overcome with the guilt, enveloped by the sadness, the grief, the pain, the anger, all mixed within the beautiful glassy ocular that stared back at me. I could feel it all as she looked into my eyes.
“Don’t act like you know me.”
She was right. I was nothing but a stranger to her, as she was with me. I had only gotten her involved in a possibly family-related act of violence, and had brought her here to the hospital, where she now lay before me, pathetic and half-dead. I only had tried to save her life.
“I’m- I’m sorry, I guess I shouldn’t have—”
“—forget about it.” She cut me off swiftly.
Silence over took the room, and it was without a doubt awkward. I looked around the room, at the machines, at the door, at the windows, and down at my feet, trying to think of a way to break the silence. She just stared down at her hands.
“Um, so,” I started, “you have a name?”
“Yeah.”
“…And that would be…?”
“… Sunya.”
“I’m Aili,” I told her, though she did not ask for my name, “do you go to school around here?”
“Locke.”
“I go there too. Strange I’ve never seen you before,” not really though, it was a pretty huge school, “shitty cafeteria, right?”
I thought I saw the traces of a smile crack her face for a moment, but before a blink, it was gone. This forced casual conversation didn’t persist for much longer, there were simply too few things I could pull out of my a** to keep it going. But it was pretty interesting how easy it seemed for me to talk with a dying girl I cared nothing about. But it seemed much harder for her to talk back.
“He-he just grabbed me off the street,” She interjected into the awkward silence that had followed our casual talk, “Told me he’d kill me if I screamed for help, or if some girl didn’t show up. I guess he meant if you didn’t show up,” she looked at me, “and when I think about it, I probably ought to have died. I don’t want this.”
This Dumb Girl, Sunya, was making no sense, at least not from where I saw it. Last night, when she was being mutilated by that monster of a man, or thing, she had been screaming, she had been crying, she had said she didn’t want to die. But now, she wishes she were? Was it the pain she was still feeling, or it could be that she felt the stitches and scars had transformed her into a monster.
They didn’t.
“But you had been screaming that you didn’t want to die. Why, now, do you want to die? Why do you wish you’d died?”
The girl turned and looked out the window that was behind me, her one emerald eye still glassy with the welling up of tears. “I’m- I’m nothing but a coward.”
“No, anyone would have acted how you did, had they been tortured like that.” I didn’t feel like my words were very comforting.
“Because I’m a coward…” I saw the look in that emerald-glinted, porcelain eye, self-pity, self-hatred, misery and grief. And I found myself hating her because of all that I saw in that eye of hers. Within a quiet moment, I realized that what I saw enveloped in her eye, was me.
“You’re not a coward,” I told her, lying right to her scarred face, “Nobody really wants to die. People… People… I know, people who’ve died, “I tried with all the will left in my fatigued mind to separate myself from that memory, that feeling,
“they didn’t really want to die, even… even when they said it was what they really wanted.”
The sad girl looked at me as though I knew nothing, understood nothing, her one deep jade ocular fixed on me, seeming confused at my words, shimmering, a dam about to burst and loose all the grief and anguish she’s endured. And now, I found myself curious, just how much pain had this girl endured? Then again, did it really matter? Would it have any effect on what had happened to us last night? Would it change the sad, sad fact that maybe, just maybe there’s a murderous inhuman monster looking to maim or kill me? Somehow I doubt it would. And yet, I still found myself wondering if I could ever really understand just how much pain this girl, Sunya, had been through.
She closed her singular green eye, and relaxed herself back down on the bed, shuffling to find a comfortable position in which to fall back into a corpse like slumber. The drugs must be hell on her system. I watched as it took her mere seconds to go from so emotional and excitable to peacefully asleep without a worry in the world. I wish I had some drugs to help me sleep too.
Come to think of it, I was still pretty damn tired. I moved the back of my chair against the far wall from the bed. Grabbing another chair, I faced it open-end toward the chair against the wall, something to prop my legs upon. Those chairs still weren’t very comfortable, but I was tired enough that I didn’t really give a damn. Slouching in one chair, my feet in the other, I attempted, once again to sleep. I couldn’t, sleep that is; I couldn’t fall asleep. Tired as I was, I couldn’t bring my mind to stop racing through chains of thoughts and ideas, memories and ponderings. My body was telling my mind to ******** off and get some rest, but it wouldn’t, it wanted everything that had occurred to make sense become understandable.
Looking up at the circular wall clock that hung on the wall opposite the bed, it looked to read 4:17. It was too damn early to be awake. I told my mind to stop, or rather it just stopped on its own, like a good brain. But one last curiosity, one last thought, ran through my head before everything went black.
‘Does my father even care that I’m gone?’
